Year: 2014

I originally wrote this as an answer to a question on Quora. The world is littered with the empty wallets of engineers that approached the stock market as a math, algorithmic, or engineering problem. The largest investment banks all have algorithmic trading programs, and they often lose large chunks of money. And sometimes they make …

I originally wrote this as an answer to a question on Quora. Full question: “And, which kind of questions should I make to the initial founders? I am not only talking about technical skills, all kind of knowledge matters.” Knowledge You should already know most of what you need to know to build version 1.0 …

I originally wrote this as an answer to a question on Quora. It forces you to figure out how to solve a problem in a way that can be explained to a computer. By doing this you learn to break down a problem into its components, how to define the problem using constraints (you have …

I originally wrote this as an answer to a question on Quora. It’s code for “is this person like us”. That almost always means that the company lacks diversity in any form. Most of the employees tend to look the same, have similar backgrounds, and similar interests. In tech that usually means white males under …

I originally wrote this as an answer to a question on Quora. In the “bad old days” the actual programming work wasn’t much different, just worse. Monitors were smaller and lower-resolution, chairs more uncomfortable, you had to spend a lot more time waiting for the computer to finish what it was doing, hardware was much …

I originally wrote this as an answer to a question on Quora. Full question: “Say networking is a blanket, for IT, systems administration, and network security. We’ll say programming is basically web app development. Can anyone with experience in either of these fields give some pros and cons about what they do and do not …

I originally wrote this as an answer to a question on Quora. Good luck with that. At this point “agile” should be considered a psychological disorder in need of treatment for people who cling to it with a death grip no matter how badly it fails in their organization. Let’s hope your founder is not …

I originally wrote this as an answer to a question on Quora. Full question: “I joined a company as a new grad and currently working with two mid level and one senior designer. It’s a chip design company. One of my co-worker’s code is very badly written and I am pretty sure there are many …

This was originally posted on wbsrch.com. It is reproduced here to preserve history. In the process of researching crowdfunding campaigns, I searched IndieGoGo for search engine pitches. I found 22 attempts to fund “actual search engines”. Here is a list (with links to the IndieGoGo campaign): TheNet101 Thumbar Jixty.com Xense Iyiyes Aspinosa Rexyo Asim Shah …

This was originally posted on wbsrch.com. It is reproduced here to preserve history. In starting WbSrch, a search competitor to Google, I knew that at some point Google would find a way to “invite us to leave” AdSense. The Terms of Service make it clear that it is incompatible with a search engine (can’t have ads on …

This was originally posted on wbsrch.com. It is reproduced here to preserve history. I’ve always wanted to build something big, but never had a burning desire to create any one specific thing. Instead I built lots of little things – small desktop apps, weekend websites, etc. It wasn’t until AltaVista shut down that I realized that the world …